I've finished my first game yesterday and one of the end game mysteries exposed a rather important thing missing from the game, namely control over resources.
SM is supposed to be about managing scarcity in a hostile environment, and as you'd expect I tended not to overflow in usable resources because you want to constantly expand because your resources in one location keep running out. Well, one of the mysteries requires you at a certain point to provide a number of shuttles with a whole lot of resources that you use for maintenance and other purposes. That part literally ruined my colony and caused a mass death of about 300 because I couldn't control how many resources actually got sent to the shuttles.
Basically the shuttles hoovered up all of my available metal, and all of a sudden I was spammed with announcements about broken buildings that couldn't be maintained. So I tried to turn off supplying the shuttles so that the metal would get diverted to where it needs to go, i.e. the colony, but setting them to low priority doesn't do much if your base is well segregated like mine was and the drones don't have loads of other things to do nearby other than supplying the nearby shuttle. The shuttles required 400 metal and my entire supply was just gone immediately because I made the mistake of landing the shuttle next to my metal storage for easy access. There was no way to really turn it off or anything, all I could do was watch how the mass death wave happened. All because of insufficient control over resources.
This is what the devs could do to improve this:
SM is supposed to be about managing scarcity in a hostile environment, and as you'd expect I tended not to overflow in usable resources because you want to constantly expand because your resources in one location keep running out. Well, one of the mysteries requires you at a certain point to provide a number of shuttles with a whole lot of resources that you use for maintenance and other purposes. That part literally ruined my colony and caused a mass death of about 300 because I couldn't control how many resources actually got sent to the shuttles.
Basically the shuttles hoovered up all of my available metal, and all of a sudden I was spammed with announcements about broken buildings that couldn't be maintained. So I tried to turn off supplying the shuttles so that the metal would get diverted to where it needs to go, i.e. the colony, but setting them to low priority doesn't do much if your base is well segregated like mine was and the drones don't have loads of other things to do nearby other than supplying the nearby shuttle. The shuttles required 400 metal and my entire supply was just gone immediately because I made the mistake of landing the shuttle next to my metal storage for easy access. There was no way to really turn it off or anything, all I could do was watch how the mass death wave happened. All because of insufficient control over resources.
This is what the devs could do to improve this:
- Allow us to turn off supplying certain buildings/shuttles by hand rather than just setting them to low priority, which does absolutely nothing when there aren't any other priority tasks in the area for the drones.
- A slider for maintaining minimum stores of various components on each storage space would also be quite good.
- Every storage space should have its own individual slider for "minimum storage".
- If the resources in the storage space are under the value, bots will only be allowed to take them for maintenance purposes - no construction or export.
- Additionally, if resources in the storage space are under the value and shuttles exist on the map, shuttles should make an effort to try to ferry in resources to that storage space from other storage spaces that are over their minimum, until that storage space reaches its minimum value. This would be a lot better than the current opaque nature of how shuttles pick their tasks.
- If the resources in the storage space are over the value, normal service resumes.
- The "request maintenance" button should cause a nearby drone to drop what they are doing and head to resupply that building immediately, I've used that button a number of times and sometimes the wait period is ridiculous especially if the drone hub is busy and I can't just unpack more drones there for whatever reason. Shuttles should probably be tied into this as well somehow if resources aren't available locally.
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